Monday, 30 December 2013

Temple Meads, today, 12.45 - 12.50pm.On the left, the 1pm Cross-Country train to Manchester Picadilly. Busy with passengers headed north to Birmingham and beyond. Drawn up alongside, the Direct Rail Services freight from Bridgwater. On board, two flasks of highly irradiated spent nuclear fuel rods from Hinkley Point, on their way to Sellafield where the plutonium will be extracted and stored to try to keep it out of the way. Full
international cast of Brief Encounter 2 includes:Direct Rail Services, the only publicly owned rail-freight company in the UK, being run by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. Hinkley Point is owned by Electricite de France (EDF), who will aim to keep the waste flowing by building Hinkley Point C, with French and Chinese capital and generous operating subsidies from the UK government. Sellafield is, like the trains, in the ownership of the NDA, but is run by Nuclear Management Partners, a consortium of the URS Corporation (USA), AMEC (UK) and Areva (France). Emergency Planning services at Sellafield have been contracted out to those exemplars of integrity and good practice, SERCO (honest!). Emergency planning in Bristol is provided by the council's Civil Protection Unit. Cross Country is owned by Deutsche Bahn.

Unlike
the 1945 film, in which the head finally rules the heart, this 2013
release gives full rein to to the recklessness of the lead
characters. And sod the children!

Now showing at railway stations across Britain

Edited 31/12/13

Saturday, 21 December 2013

It's
three years since the Localism Bill was proudly unveiled by
Communities Secretary Eric Pickles. It would, he said

“herald a
ground-breaking shift in power to councils and communities
overturning decades of central government control and starting a new
era of people power “ .

There was a lot more of the same sort of
populist guff....

Six months earlier,
South Glos councillors had turned down an
application from SITA to build an incinerator – sorry,
waste-to-energy facility – sorry, Severnside Energy Recovery Centre
- at Hallen, three miles north of Avonmouth. It was much more than a
NIMBY decision; the area was already overcommitted to waste treatment
plant over and above the local need, and the West of England councils
were committed to a 'dispersal' strategy to reduce distances that
waste must be carried . [Since then, our councils, with that
unlikely Local Hero Gary Hopkins at the fore, have abandoned
incineration altogether and gone for more advanced technology, along
with then innovative food waste colections which are both proving
themselves well . Gary survived the Evening Post vilification
treatment. Lets hope Daniella Radice is equally resilient ].

But SITA now saw a
commercial opportunity to burn as much as half the industrial and
commercial waste produced in the West of England area. They appealed
to the Secretary of State against the South Glos. decision. In 2011
there was a planning inquiry, at which Mr Pickles' Inspector took the
SITA side. Pickles duly overturned the local councillors' decision.
So SITA got their permission, but, in the absence of the local
customers they'd described in their appeal, they still had nothing to give
investors the confidence to put up the cash.

Incinerators need an
assured flow of waste to burn – so the operators build in contract
terms so that their customers must pay dearly for any shortfall in supply.
Who cares that that obstructs any new measures to reduce waste or
divert materials for recycling? If local authorities, desperate to
avoid landfill taxes, commit to paying out £1.4 billion to burn
waste by open combustion in an incinerator for 25 years; well, it's a
proven if primitive technology, and financiers are keen to put up the
capital with such low risks and high prospective profits. That's
the theory.

Having had no more luck
selling disposal contracts to local businesses than it had with the
West of England local authorities, SITA cast its net wider. In
west London it found a consortium of 6 underperforming and
unambitious boroughs that were still sending high levels of waste to
landfill, and were pretty low down the recycling tables. A deal was done.
The incinerator would be built at Hallen as that champion of
localisation, Pickles, had ruled; the waste to feed it would now come
from the bins of Ealing, Brent, Hounslow, Richmond, Harrow, and
Hillingdon.

Of the incinerator
outputs, some would be the stack emissions, mostly drifting across
North Bristol; some would be 'bottom ash'; some would be highly
hazardous fly ash. Some of the heat would generate electricity for
the grid, but unless neighbouring customers could be found for the
bulk of the waste heat, that would just be dissipated to atmosphere.

Even given the deal,
the promise of a cast iron long-term contract, and the profits and
low risks that go with it, it seems that investors still didn't exactly
queue up waving their cheque books.

Enter the Green
Investment Bank. Set up about the same time as Pickles was banging
on about the virtues of small government and local decision making,
the GIB is supposed dip into its £3.8 billion to back 'green'
projects in offshore wind, energy efficiency (especially the 'green deal') , or waste
reduction/treatment where its “capital, knowledge and reputation
make the difference that enables a project to be successfully
financed“.

The GIB must be
struggling, what with investors pulling out of offshore wind and the
controversy over the big energy companies 'taxing' consumers with what
Cameron reportedly dismisses as 'green crap'. It's been putting
money into such bizarrely ungreen projects as converting Drax from
coal to biomass – wood pellets imported from the forest clearance in the USA. Apparently
that's a net reduction in local CO2 emissions, so it qualifies.

At Hallen, the GIB has
put £20 million into SERC. As their press release
put it, “GIB will invest £20 million of the senior debt alongside
a lending club of Credit Agricole Corporate & Investment Bank,
Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation
and Mizuho Bank. Equity will be provided by SITA UK, Japan's ITOCHU
Corporation and Scottish Widows Investment Partnership.”

Thanks to them, and Mr
“where there's muck there's brass” Pickles, household waste with
plenty of recyclable materials still in it will be rail freighted
from London to be burned here, in an area where our more progressive
local authories have already found ways to recycle more, to pollute
less, and to keep it local.

Monday, 16 December 2013

The
announcement
that Bristol has recruited Max Wide to become the city's 'Strategic
Director for Business Change' raises some alarming questions. Not
so much about the new man, but on the agenda of those who chose to
recruit him.

It
doesn't look good. Mr Wide has history, inside and outside local
authorities. His CV shows he has 'worked with over 60 local
authorities delivering change programmes' either as employee, on
secondment from BT Local Government (the IT services arm of BT), or
with consultancies such as iMPOWER. There's one constant theme
running through the lot – outsourcing and privatisation.

Local
government watchers will be well aware of 'Broken Barnet', the London
borough whose political leadership has gone to unprecedented lengths
to cut services and farm out what's left to expensive and inefficient
'services' companies. Mr Wide was very deeply involved in making
it happen.

Then
there was Suffolk CountyCouncil,
with much the same agenda (since abandoned) . And the West Midlands
borough of Sandwell, where the management of Children's Services was
contracted out to Mr Wide's iMPOWER, led (oddly enough) by their
newest employee, Suffolk's director of Childrens Services. After
that it was Doncaster, where the government insisted that management
of the failing Children's Services be privatised – and iMPOWER got
the contract, at least until an 'independent' trust can take over.

So
that's what Max Wide is about. Privatisation and outsourcing is
what he does. And now he's been invited to take up a lucrative post
in Bristol.

But
the real story, surely, is to ask who chose him, and why... what's
the political programme he is to carry out?.

It's
inconceivable that his record as an arch-privatiser is not the
reason.

Sunday, 1 December 2013

It's
always going to be difficult when elected councillors are asked to
rule on planning applications from their own councils. When it
happens, they're expected to exercise the same dispassionate and
independent judgement as they apply to any other planning
application. That includes, in particular, avoiding any possible
charge that they have prejudged the decision.

That
was the situation on Wednesday, when Bristol City Council sought the
blessing of its own Development Control Comittee to construct the
in-city leg of the South Bristol Link Road, attracting heavy traffic
through Withywood and across Highridge Common to the A38. There it
joins the North Somerset leg, already approved for construction, and
primarily a route that opens up green belt for development while
clipping as much as a minute off airport journey times. (It will
also save busy commuters
the embarrassment and inconvenience of running over Barrow Gurney
villagers)

On
the day, the Bristol councillors voted the Withywood leg through by 8
votes to 2.

One
of the dissidents was the Greens' Daniella Radice, who found a host
of reasons (reinforced by the transparent failure of officers to
offer convincing answers to her questions) to vote against. The
other was Labour's Sean Beynon, who could not reconcile the undoubted
expense of a very dubious project with a cash-strapped council being forced
into harsh austerity measures by a ruthlessly ideological government
(my words, not Sean's!). It just doesn't add up.

Helen
Holland would surely have joined them – but as a long-standing and
very public objector to the project she did the decent thing and
stood down from the Committee – only to be replaced by a Labour
colleague, Afzhal Shah, who decided to go with the flow and approve
the road.

Of
course Helen should have invoked Abraham's Empty Heads Law. All she
needed was a simple statement saying “But
I wish to give an absolute assurance, and that assurance is, that I
come to this with a completely open mind. That must be done, and
that is what I shall do.” It worked for Peter Abraham
on the Ashton Vale Town Green debacle.

At
least two previously-declared cheerleaders for the Link Road weren't
troubled by any suspicion that they might have formed a view before
the meeting.

Both Claire Campion-Smith and Mark Wright had been
part of the LibDem Cabinet that unanimously agreed to bid for
government support for the road back in March 2010. Mark Wright
had, at that meeting, (and in comments on this blog) rehearsed some
of the same pro-road arguments as he repeated on Wednesday before
voting in favour of the new road.

Planning
applicants..... planning committees...... sometimes they just seem
to merge into one.

About this Blog

This one's from the little known Bristolian outpost of Stockwood, first settled by city expats back in the fifties. Leafy, open, and close to the countryside.... until they grub up the Green Belt and open spaces to build an 'urban extension'.

Written by an adoptive Stockwoodsman, arrived from the wild north-east back in 2004, this blog sets out to look at Stockwood and Bristol issues, mostly from a green perspective